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Prediction: We are heading for an AI-middle ground boom.
Predictions regarding AI tend to cluster in two extremes, those who believe we are on a parabolic arc towards super-intelligence and those who believe AI just produces slop. The pessimism regarding AI clusters around to conflicting narratives, it is so good it will cause mass unemployment and AI is so useless that the AI bubble will pop. My take is that AI is mid and that is a good thing. Gemini 3 and Claude 4.5 are useful. However, since LLMs are limited by context windows, social skills, an inability to learn after training and don't have human judgment they can't replace us. Both doomer narratives are false, we aren't going to replace all the software developers with claude, and claude is not so useless that users will abandon it, causing the AI bubble to pop.
The AI speedup is more than worker speed being improved by LLMs. Many projects are stalled waiting for someone else to complete a task. A typical corporate scenario is that someone works an hour on something, emails it to someone who waits a week before working an hour on it, and then sends it off to the next person. With LLMs enormous speed ups can be achieved by not having to wait for answers.
AI is much more than large language models. It has long been used in areas like weather prediction, and over the past decade its capabilities have advanced dramatically. Twelve years ago, AI systems struggled with basic image recognition tasks such as distinguishing cats from dogs; today, they can reliably detect subtle anomalies on factory floors. AI is now widely applied in biotech, scientific research, mining, oil extraction, fraud detection, and many other fields.
What once required a machine-learning PhD can often be accomplished in a matter of days by a technically competent practitioner using cloud platforms such as Google Cloud. While humanoid robots have captured public attention and robot butlers remain unrealistic, AI is already accelerating the deployment of industrial robots and other forms of automation. Advanced driver-assistance systems are reducing the risk of traffic accidents, and AI is speeding up academic work and scientific discovery. More broadly, AI excels at uncovering patterns in massive datasets and surfacing insights and information that would otherwise remain hidden.
Scientific work is iterative. Progress is built upon earlier progress, and one bottleneck in a chain of discoveries prevents the subsequent discoveries from happening.
If AI can unlock a few bottlenecks, that could unlock subsequent discoveries that depend upon them. We could see a small jump in scientific discoveries.
Predictions for the culture war:
We are not going to see mass unemployment, even if a few sectors end up being impacted. Smaller organizations are more nimble and able to react to changes while having similar access to AI as large corporations, this benefits small players. AI deflationary as the cost of production go down. AI in ecommerce is making the field even more cut throat driving prices down. Low inflation will cause low interest rates and high asset price inflation. The economy is going to have wind in its back over the next decade as productivity rises. Government is going to be worse at utilizing AI than the private sector leading to an increasing view of the government as incompetent and falling behind.
Strong agree that AI will not cause mass unemployment. If the industrial revolution didn't create widespread unemployment while pushing 80%+ of the population from agriculture to manufacturing/services, then it's safe to assume basically nothing ever will stop a society from having to do work of some sort, even if it's just silly stuff like zero-sum status games.
Also agree that AI will be "mid" relative to the FOOM doomer and singularity expectations that some have. I'm a bit more bearish on the productivity gains than you are. There will certainly be gains to some extent, but a lot of society's blockers are socially-enforced like housing restrictions, lawyerly reviews, etc. that are political problems that AI won't be able to solve by itself.
It created ample unemployment among industries where the machines were just flat out better than a human could be.
The whole premise with AGI is that it can in theory be better at everything that a human could do.
Yes, but those people then just found different jobs, and society became more efficient overall. Losing your job temporarily sucks but creative destruction is part of living in a vibrant society.
AGI will never be better than humans at simply being human, which will count for a lot to some people and to some fields.
The popularity of Replika et al makes me worry your final claim is less secure than you might think.
AI will do some things that humans used to have a monopoly on, like companionship, but other sectors will remain the realm of humans for decades. Stuff like human doctors, even if AI is proven to be better in every possible way, will still be wanted since "that's how we've always done it". It will take many years to work through stuff like that.
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